Now it was necessary to concentrate for a few minutes on the details of getting Joe officially checked out of the hospital. As soon as they were effectively alone again, with Charley carrying Joe’s bag for him across the lobby—it had taken Joe some arguing to keep from being forced to ride down in a wheelchair—Charley said: “Another reason, as I get it, is that there’s actually a couple—three big old houses out in that direction that could actually be described as castles. Owned naturally by some pretty big people, so we don’t want to bother ‘em unnecessarily. And our star witness is a little vague on his geography—he’s gonna ride in the car with you and me, by the way, once we get our caravan organized. Seems he requested it that way.”
In front of the hospital Charley’s unmarked police car waited, under the usual cloudy Chicago sky. When they were in the car and moving, and Charley had reported in on the radio, he asked: “What you think it is, anyway, with all these different names our star witness likes to use?”
“Who is he now? And did you find out how he got out of that cell at headquarters?”
“He just keeps sayin’ the door was open. We don’t want to push him on that until we find out if he can help us with Carados’ friends. And he’s still Falcon, as far’s I know. We still don’t have any better make on ‘im than that. No fingerprints, nothing.”
Joe turned the subject over in his mind, not for the first time. Feathers, Hawk, Falcon. There was certainly an association there, even a progression of sorts. “A falcon’s a kind of hawk,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Well, with or without a real name he ain’t much as a star witness. But maybe he can put us onto something if he can recognize this castle where he claims he was. Some of Carados’ people from New Orleans are still runnin’ loose somewhere, that much we do know. Including the one you shot at and hit down the alley. There was a good blood trail there and I thought we had ‘im. But then the trail just cut off. How come your gun was loaded with silver bullets?”
“What?” said Joe, weakly. Then understanding, of a sort, came, a few seconds after shock.
“You heard me, man. Silver. The bullets that you fired. The ones we could find, anyway. You emptied your piece and we found three, two in Carados and one ricochet all flattened out of shape, on the alley pavement.” Charley didn’t sound really perturbed. More as if silver bullets were something you were likely to run into maybe once a year.
There was one man Joe would have liked to be able to consult before he had to discuss this subject any more, but that man didn’t happen to be available. Somewhat to Joe’s surprise, he found himself wishing that there’d been a vampire in the hospital last night, to give him a nocturnal briefing.
But he was going to have to answer on his own. “Suppose,” he said carefully, “I say I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about?”
“Then,” said Charley, “we would have to hypothesize.” He brought the word out in carefully polished tones, but nonchalantly, as if he thought that coming from him it might have a certain surprise value. “And what we hypothesize is something like this: some unknown friend of yours was in that alley too, and carrying a piece, and his just happened to be loaded in that silvery and unorthodox style. And after your friend had departed, taking with him all his spent cartridge cases, we found some of his bullets but none of yours. This theory, however, however attractive it may be, fails when we hear from the lab that the silver bullets were all fired from your gun, don’t bullshit me, man.”
And all the time Charley, unperturbed, drove on quietly and safely through spattering rain. Not looking at Joe, he waited for an answer.
For years now Joe had been expecting the arrival of some moment like this one, when he would have to try to make such things as vampires and magic a part of some official record. He’d even had bad dreams about it a few times. He wasn’t ready to face the moment yet, if there was any way at all in which it could be avoided.
He said: “No regulation that I know of against loading silver.”
“And your old lady can afford it, if you can’t. Oh shit, man, don’t come on to me now with regulations.” At last Charley was irritated. “Off the record, now. Nobody in the Department really gives a damn if you fired diamonds or moneymarket certificates at that cat, long as you wasted him. I don’t think any reporters gonna get their hands on any of that silver. But—well, I didn’t figure you for going to fortune tellers, any of that jazz.”
“No,” Joe sighed. So far the reporters had been put off effectively, but sooner or later they’d have to talk to the hero who’d shot Carados. That would be another thing to face. “I didn’t figure myself that way either. Can we talk about all this later?”
“Sure. But you’re gonna have to talk about it pretty soon, with some people a lot higher up in the Department than me.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Their arranged rendezvous with the other lawmen was at a state police station in a western suburb. They reached the place a little after three o’clock, and Joe was introduced to FBI, State’s Attorney, State Police; they all gave him looks of large respect, somewhat tinged with envy. He was the wounded waster of Carados.
And they had Falcon with them, and were of course watching the old man continuously if casually. It was the first glimpse Joe had had of the old man since they’d both been carried out of the alley the night before. The old guy was unhurt, dressed now in a fresh issue of jail clothes, though not officially under arrest, and appeared to be much wrapped up in his own thoughts. When the large all-male party had been reshuffled and dealt out into four cars for the long drive, Joe found himself in the back seat of a CPD vehicle. Falcon sat at his left side, with Charley on the other side of Falcon. Christoffel, another Homicide detective, was doing the driving, with a man from Intelligence, whose name Joe hadn’t really caught, beside him.
When they had got under way, Joe asked conversationally: “How’s it going, Mr. Falcon?”
The old man hardly turned his head, and didn’t really answer. With a worried expression he appeared to be contemplating his own right thumbnail, which stuck up from his hand clasped in his lap. The car was heading now for an entrance to the westbound/northwestbound interstate, the three other cars of the convoy with it, two ahead and one behind.
Joe’s wounded arm hurt. He eased it out of the sling, and tried to arrange support for it by crossing his legs. “Or have you decided to change your name again?” It wasn’t a jeer, but a respectful request for information.
“Wish I could, sometimes.” The old man’s voice was surprisingly clear, reasonable, thoughtful. If they could put him on the stand like this they’d have a good chance in court, provided of course that they could catch someone for him to be a witness against. Wherever his voice was coming from now, it was a great distance from Skid Row. The old gray-blue eyes looked at Joe from behind their hoods, took note of him, and gazed on through.
“We’re going to look at some buildings, big houses, ask you to look at them. I guess they’ve told you about that.”
“Yeah.” A sigh. “I’ll look at ‘em. I’ll tell you what I can.”
“That’s good.”
The old man went back to his thumbnail. Joe stared out the window at passing suburbia. For some reason he found himself wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been born on a farm.
Time passed silently in the car. The old man had already been questioned on every subject where it was thought he might know something. There were other topics the men might have talked about but didn’t want to bring up in front of him. They were probably all tired, wishing they could be spending their Sunday on something else. The caravan kept moving at a good clip along the highway, keeping up with all but the fastest traffic. A half hour had gone by with no conversation of consequence, and suburbia was being replaced by farmlands, when suddenly the old man sighed. There was that in the sound which got attention.
“I’m gonna have to take a hand,” he announced. His hands we
re still clasped together, but he was staring straight ahead, no longer at his thumbnails.
The Intelligence man had hitched himself around in his seat, and was looking back at the potential witness with a psychologist’s estimating eye. “Take a hand in what matter, sir?” he inquired.
“Once a man realizes who his real enemies are, then he’s got to do something about it.”
Joe felt a chill.
“Like his kidnappers,” said the Intelligence man.
The old man stared at him blankly for a while. Then at last he said “Right,” as if his thoughts had been racing a long way ahead and had had to come back to answer belatedly.
Satisfied, the Intelligence man nodded, smiled, turned to face front again, letting well enough alone. Joe still felt a chill.
“And a man has to help his friends,” murmured the old man, very low. “His allies; even if he doesn’t like ‘em.” He fell back into a near-trance, staring at his hands.
Charley Snider had seen a lot of psychos in his day, and probably thought he knew the harmless ones. He glanced at the old man once now, then out at cornfields. Then, as if something the glance had shown him had caught belatedly at his instincts, he looked back again. “Mr. Falcon?”
“Don’t bug me now,” said the old man in a voice of fierce concentration. “Gimme ten minutes to—think.” And something in the way he said it made Intelligence turn his head again, open his mouth, and then decide not to interfere. Christoffel looked back in the mirror, and then just kept on driving.
Five minutes later the driver commented: “Looks like some heavy weather up ahead. Damn. Some of those back roads’ll be…” He let it go. No one bothered to take it up.
A good seven minutes more passed, before the old man relaxed, with a sigh that seemed to come out of some vault of the dark past. He let himself sink back in the seat, suddenly looking worn and almost frail. “That’s it,” he breathed. “Talisman’s out, just in time.”
Joe looked round sharply. Charley asked: “Who’s that?”
“Just thinking out loud,” said Falcon weakly. Before anyone could ask him anything else, he added: “I think we’re gonna meet some people up there, this place we’re going to.”
“Someone named Talisman?” asked Charley. “Who’s that?”
“We’ll see,” said the old man, letting his eyes close. “I can identify the place for you. I’m sure of that now.”
It was the first time he’d ever made such a confident assertion, and the others exchanged hopeful looks.
“How about the people?” Charley asked him. “The ones who kidnapped you. If they’re there.”
Another great sigh. “Yeah, them too.”
After that, nobody wanted to push any more questions at him right away. Five minutes more of silence and it began to rain; as the driver had foreseen, heavy stuff. The wipers monotonously flogged the windshield.
“Helicopters won’t do us a damn bit of good in this, if we should need ‘em,” someone in the front seat complained.
“They’re still standing by.”
The car radio signaled, and the Intelligence man talked for a time on its handset phone. Joe couldn’t hear much of what the conversation was about. He wasn’t trying very hard. He had other things to think about.
The first “castle” they were to take a look at was near Sycamore. Pale stone and pointed windows, behind a towering hedge. Joe might have described the place as a castle himself, but the old man dismissed it with an absently contemptuous wave of his hand.
“You sure? Take a good look.”
“I’m sure. Let’s get the hell on with it. This is not the place.”
“You said you didn’t get much of a look at the outside of the place where they were holding you.”
“I got a quick look. This ain’t it. Let’s go.”
They stopped at a drive-in for hamburgers and coffee. An hour after that, they discovered that the road by which they had intended to approach the Littlewood castle was flooded, the river here up with the rain, over the floodplain that lay along its southwestern bank.
“Okay. Back through Blackhawk then, and we’ll go around, come in from the other direction.” Men were looking at their watches and swearing to themselves.
“Do these people know we’re coming?”
“Couldn’t reach anybody there by phone; they say the phones are connected, though.”
“I gotta take a leak,” the old man said. “How about stopping somewhere?”
A gas station near the outskirts of Blackhawk was honored for the occasion. While the cars’ tanks were being filled again the men for the most part stood around beside the cars, talking about the rain and watching it pour down just beyond the edge of the high canopy sheltering the pumps.
Joe and a state trooper were both keeping an eye on the door of the men’s room while the old man was inside. There was no window, they’d made sure, no other possible way out of the closet-sized chamber. Still Joe was almost surprised when Mr. Falcon reappeared in perfectly normal fashion.
The state trooper now took a turn in the closet himself, leaving Joe for a moment effectively alone with the old man. Joe didn’t waste any time.
“Mr. Falcon, thanks.”
“Oh?” Falcon gave him a shrewd look, and didn’t ask him thanks for what.
“But they picked up some of those bullets I fired. Turned out they’re silver. They weren’t when I loaded ‘em, but… I’m in for some kind of an investigation.”
The old man chewed this over for a few seconds, as Joe stood before him more supplicant than guard. At last Falcon offered: “Deal?”
Joe nodded eagerly, then hesitated. “What’ve you got in mind?”
“Tell me how you know about the Sword. I can fix it about those bullets.”
Joe considered, mentally crossed his fingers, and said a prayer. He’d noticed in the past few years that he was getting into the habit of doing that. He decided. “A man named Talisman told me.”
“You know ‘im, huh?” The old man gave a wise, slow nod, as if impressed; and in the next moment burly policemen were milling around both of them, talking about the roads and the weather.
As they were driving along the highway on the north bank of the Sauk, some miles west of Blackhawk, the old man began urging them to stop. Presently the whole caravan had pulled over. The sun was setting and they’d all just put their headlights on. They were right at some wide place in the road called Frenchman’s Bend. The few houses and shacks were all dark and silent, looking totally uninhabited. The rain had stopped, for the time being anyway, and the swollen river looked ominous and dirty.
The old man got out of the car on the side toward the river, and then just stood for a moment peering across, as if he could really see something on the far side. Joe could see the dark, humped smudges of the wooded bluffs over there and an enormous full moon struggling to get airborne above some of those trees and between the clouds.
“That’s the place,” the old man said. “Right over there.” He sounded eager, but not in any particular hurry.
“Might be,” someone muttered. “It oughta be about there.”
Someone even raised the idea of trying to get a boat, but no one else had any enthusiasm for that idea.
Once they crossed the river again, at the next bridge thirty miles below Blackhawk, they started having some more trouble with roads. With a little luck and daring they got through, but it was full night by the time the caravan reached what had to be the castle. The main building was invisible, but headlight beams fell on a massive stone wall, and after they had driven a little way along the road that followed the wall they came to where a private drive went in through an old chained gate.
The full moon was now well above the trees in the east; it evoked bizarre shapes and shadows among the trees inside the grounds.
“We’re not going to bother the owners tonight, correct?”
“It’s not that late, we could give them a try.”
Men
got out of their cars, looking for a doorbell or something similar. They milled around, some of them with pocket flashlights in hand.
“Where’s Falcon?”
“Where’s Falcon?”
“He was right here, sonovabitch. Sonovabitch, come on, guys, where is he?”
“He was right—”
But he wasn’t anymore.
When the screams started from the direction of the house it gave them an even better reason for breaking in.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Hildy Littlewood was running for her life, fleeing from her husband, from the man with whom she’d once sworn love, undying love. On flying feet she sped through darkened stone passageways, past midnight vaults. The lights in the castle were few, and seemed to be going out one by one. Once she stopped running in a place where she was sure there was a light switch, and ran her hands over the wall for what seemed like hours, whimpering all the while, until she found it. She flicked the switch up and down a score of times but nothing happened. Somehow the electricity must have been turned off. Maybe the lightning…
Now she could hear Saul’s pacing feet, not running after her, pursuing patiently instead. His voice, a room away, called: “Hil?”
She fled again, gasping with the effort, knowing this was all a dream, taking comfort in the fact that before much longer she would simply have to wake up. To find herself where, and doing what? Hildy came to a door that she knew had to lead to the outside. She threw herself at it, wrenching and pushing at the latch and knob. They would not turn or move, they would not even rattle. As if the whole door and wall had been carved in one piece from wood, or built in one piece of reinforced concrete. Hildy almost collapsed, sobbing.
Here came Saul’s patient feet again, pacing and pausing, once more a room away. Saul probably feared that if he came into the same room with her she’d had another hysterical screaming fit.
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